Posted tagged ‘New Testament’

One of the most common skeptical positions in regard to the Bible is that we can’t trust it because it has changed over time, and we don’t even have the original text anymore. We likely don’t have any of the original text, and we have very little text that goes back to the 1st or even 2nd centuries.

The “telephone game” that children play is often used as an illustration of how easily things that are communicated get twisted and changed so that we can’t even tell what the original meaning was by the time the communication comes back to us after being repeated over and over from one person to the next. This illustration is applied to the Bible as proof that it can’t be trusted because it has been translated and copied over and over and over again. How do we even know what the original text said?!

These are serious contentions. An honest person cannot just brush these contentions aside.

Yes faith is a foundation of Christian belief, but Christian faith is not a blind faith as some suppose. Christian faith means putting our trust in God, and not in ourselves. Christian faith does not insist or even ask us to throw out our minds in the process.

In fact, we are specifically instructed to love God not only with our hearts and strength, but with our minds! As I have stated previously, doubt and skepticism is not a sin according to the Bible. Thomas doubted, and he became known for his skepticism but he was a follower of Jesus. Though he was skeptical, he came to believe.

Paul urged the Thessalonians to “test everything”, and hold on to what is good and true. I call this “honest skepticism”, which should not be confused with skepticism for the sake of skepticism. Anyone who is skeptical of everything, even the certainty of truth, should not even bother looking into anything because the exercise is pointless for the pure skeptic who is unwilling to commit to any truths.

(Ironically, the contention that there is no objective truth is a self-defeating statement. The statement, itself, is offered as an objective truth, therefore it isn’t even true of itself!)

But we digress. Whether the Bible can be trusted is the question? So, let’s dive in.

In this piece, I largely follow a presentation given by Dr. Danial Wallace*, but I add in some additional information about the early church to round out the information. Dr. Wallace underscores the fact that the early church was particularly concerned about the authorship of the writings they relied upon. They only trusted the writings of the apostles and associates of the apostles. We see this concern reflected in the writings of the earliest church fathers.

The original gospels, however, were anonymous, notes Wallce; that is they did not have internal references to who wrote them. They were only given names to distinguish them from each other externally, and this tradition went all the way back as far as we can trace them. The fact that the early church was so concerned with authorship, but universally accepted and used the four canonical gospels, suggests that the authorship of the Gospels was never in doubt.

This point will become more important below. How the Gospels and other documents that have come to comprise the New Testament became recognized as scripture and other documents did not, is the subject of this piece.

A recent conversation with one of my sons spurred me to consider slavery as it is addressed in the New Testament because the Bible is sometimes criticized by skeptics who point to its treatment of slavery. Indeed, there are instructions given to the nation of Israel that seem to accept slavery as a practice, and the New Testament does not expressly condemn it.